A financial planner explains why starting a new job is the best time to negotiate salary

Sophia Bera, a certified financial planner and the founder of Gen Y Planning, explains why you should negotiate your salary when starting a new job. Following is a transcript of the video.

So what a lot of people don't realize is that the best time to actually negotiate a salary is when you get a new job. So a lot of times, we are so excited to be offered a new job that we forget that we can actually negotiate our salary or we forget that we are actually in a really good position to be able to do so, that his company really wants us and that we are bringing a unique set of skills to the table and so I really recommend that you always negotiate your salary.

The other thing is your employer is expecting you to do this and so, that was the other thing that I didn't realize when I was younger and I actually made this money mistake. Early on, my first job in financial planning, they made me an offer, they were like, "we are going to pay you", you know, "$40K a year" and I thought that I had won the lottery. I thought this was the most money that I had, you know - I just didn't even think that I would be earning that much money at 23 and I quickly said yes and was very excited about it.

But what was interesting is when I was getting into this profession, it was around the height of the market so they had the budget to be able to offer me a competitive salary and then the stock market crashed and guess what, our 401K match, got taken away and then the next year, salaries were flat, and then the next year, I switched jobs and was really trying to negotiate that new salary but because of the market downturn, you know, I got like a $2K raise but they weren't paying for my health insurance premiums anymore. So I basically made about the same amount of money my first five years in the financial planning profession because I didn't negotiate that first salary and I really feel like I learned a lot from that experience and I don't want you to make the same mistake.